I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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Apple's New iOS 7 Design Secret - More Innovation

Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announces iOS 7 at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco on June 10, 2013. Apple unveiled its hotly anticipated iTunes Radio Service, as the iconic maker of the iPhone moved to challenge streaming music operators like Pandora and Spotify. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

A lot of the commentary around the iOS 7 has focused on appearance and usability, skeuomorphic vs flat, but Lars Hard, CTO and founder of Swedish AI specialists, Expertmaker, believes the real potential lies in the evolution of the iPhone and iPad towards a more 3D-centric environment. The design itself, therefore, is a platform for innovation.

It is, Hard says, a first step in the direction of a richer mobile experience, and under the hood Apple is providing many of the tools needed for developers to exploit the richer user experiences that 3D effects will bring. More than that, though, he believes, a more 3D-like interface is necessary.

(This is one of a short series of posts I’ve written looking deeper into iOS 7 as an innovation platform. See yesterday’s post here).

“They have made a first step towards more exciting user experiences,” he told me on the phone from Malmö. “And these are all connected to the other things they are doing with iOS.”

Hard’s company makes tools for developers to exploit the AI potential of smartphones and yes, there’s an obvious element of self-interest there. 3D and contextual applications require machine learning if they are to play out in a simple interface.

The transition from skeuomorphic to flat design could be seen as a catch-up (even an adoption of Microsoft’s design language) but it is also a pragmatic way of dealing with the growing number of smartphone use cases.

Hard is particularly keen on the parallax, transparency effect. And the reason is that he sees the growth in sensor and related data producing far more complex services that need to be simplified in the UI, and that users will need to preview and navigate via transparent and 3D effects.

Yesterday I touched on some of those points in enterprise applications that will be built from geo-tagging, micro-location and multitasking capabilities. There is also a slew of new intelligent features such as recommendations for iTunes radio, the SIRI upgrade, sorting of photographs, inside iOS 7.

All of this needs serving up to users, and yet devices like the iPhone and iPad are now saturated with apps. That means two new directions are needed.

The first is just at the level of the flat, transparent effect of the iOS 7 design, coupled to semi 3D effects like the Rolodex analogy for pages. It allows users to preview applications and information that they may wish to use, rather than navigating back and fore, without the clutter of skeuomorphic representation. Images and visual clues have to be clearly visible behind semi-transparent layers and even by holding the phone at different angles, so that users can make quick choices.

Even so, the interface will be required to represent too broad a range of signals – time, location, compass, movement – coupled to a much broader range of new contextual services.

According to Hard all of this means the phone has to become more predictive. It has to second-guess more of the applications you want to use – through context (where you are, what your usage patterns are etc), which in turn opens up more scope for innovation. The phone has to feed the interface, and its various 3D layers, based on its knowledge of you. That in turn means developers will need to make more use of machine learning – which is where his company’s tools come in.

How important is 3D? I asked Ed Anuff, VP of mobile and developer technologies at API platform, Apigee, whose constituency is the global app community. He agrees that the design element is interesting but sees it as longer term. “I think it’s true, 3D design is now easier,” he says. “But it’s going to take time for people to master that. Over the next twelve months you’ll see a number of 3D effects used over and over, likely out of the box the way Apple has demonstrated.”

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Thank you for being one of the first financial bloggers to think about iOS7 long enough to understand how the design aesthetic will lead to advanced functionality and innovation with layers, translucency, and 3D. iOS7 is a huge advancement for Apple and we’ve only scratched the surface on how it will improve the user experience.

It looks like many of us are not exactly excited by iOS7 redesign. What many designers think : http://designerscomplaining.tumblr.com What many developers think : http://ios7redesign.tumblr.com/tagged/ios-developers

Actually, I’m one of those developers who are very worried about is going on at Apple.

Steve Jobs is dead. Scott Forstall was fired. Designers like Mike Matas are gone. How could iOS continue to be iOS ?

I thought Cook and Ive would be faithful to Jobs’ well known opinions on design and user interface.

But iOS7 looks exactly like what Jobs used to hate. Jobs used to refer to Apple’s DNA. But it was not Apple’s DNA, it was his, and the new executives want obviously iOS to use theirs.

It’s not just those ugly icons. Those reveal a degree of amateurism which we didn’t know Apple could produce (imagine this for a sec in the Jobs era !), which is worrisome, but I’m sure they will be fixed by the time of the final release.

I’m more concerned with the overuse of white in the navigation, the new borderless buttons which make any application looks like an un-styled, HTML mock-up. The meaningless, ugly outlined icons (those won’t change). The over thin Helvetica Neue, which looks good in a fashion brochure, but not a daily basis in a user interface. The list could be long, but pretty much everything is said in the aforementioned developer quotes.

Hi Dominique – how do you think it will affect your ability to serve your customers? Could you say a little bit about your business and iOs 7s potential impact? By the way – who set up the tumblr sites?

I’ve been running a home business for 13 years. My iOS developments were done as a subcontractor so far, but I’m about to release a series of very innovating jazz piano applications under my brand. It won’t affect my product since it doesn’t rely much on iOS default controls and, where it does, I will re-skin when needed so it looks right. My disappointment is not a complaint as a developer. It’s a disappointment as a user, from a developer standpoint. Please also have a look at this analysis of iOS7′s usability : http://branch.com/b/ios-7-design

Agreed to disagree!! Everyone is using technology that has already been developed. Nobody is really innovating NEW. Especially not Apple. They are innovating the least out of the top 5 mobile devices manufacturers. Lets get real.